Month: October 2013

This is the list of definitions of Collective Intelligence, that I came across until now (hopefully to be augmented from time to time..):

Collective intelligence is “to effectively use the information provided by others to improve one’s application”.
Collective intelligence of users is the “a) intelligence that’s extracted out from the collective set of interactions and contributions made by your users; b) “the use of this intelligence to act as a filter for what’s valuable in your application for a user—This filter takes into account a user’s preferences and interactions to provide relevant information to the user”;
Source: http://www.manning.com/alag/;

“It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. I’ll add the following indispensable characteristic to this definition: The basis and goal of collective intelligence is mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities.”
Source: Pierre Levy,

“Contemporary science sees societies, organisms and brains as complex adaptive systems (Ball, 2012; Holland, 1992; J. H. Miller & Page, 2007). This means that they consist of a vast number of relatively autonomous agents (such as cells, neurons or individuals) that interact locally via a variety of channels. Together these channels form a complex, dynamic network. Out of these non-linear interactions, some form of coherent, coordinated activity emerges—a phenomenon known as self-organization (Camazine et al., 2003; Heylighen, 2013). The resulting organization is truly distributed over the components of the system: it is not localized, centralized or directed by one or a few agents, but arises out of the interconnections between all the agents.”
Source: Heylighen, Distributed intelligence technologies (unpublished)

According to Heylighen, the difference between distributed intelligence and collective intelligence is that the later one inculdes only humans, while the former can encompass technological artefacts too.
Source: Heylighen, Distributed intelligence technologies, page (unpublished)

Collective wisdom, also called group wisdom and co-intelligence, is shared knowledge arrived at by individuals and groups. Collective intelligence, which is sometimes used synonymously with collective wisdom, is more of a shared decision process than collective wisdom. Unlike collective wisdom, collective intelligence it is not uniquely human, and has been associated with animal and plant life. Collective intelligence is basically consensus-driven decision making, whereas collective wisdom is not necessarily focused on the decision process. Collective wisdom is a more amorphous phenomenon which can be characterized by collective learning over time.
Source: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_wisdom)